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Jim is a business executive, entrepreneur, and thought leader on big data, privacy, security, and voting systems. Currently, Jim is VP of Products & Chief Privacy Officer at Metanautix. He also currently serves on the The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee (DPIAC) providing advice at the request of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the DHS Chief Privacy Officer.

Most recently, Jim was Vice President, Data Systems at inome and the first Chief Privacy Officer at Intelius. Jim led the big data team that powers the company’s products as well as serving as its chief consumer advocate. Prior to inome and Intelius, Jim served as president and chief technology officer at Identity.net, an Internet... Read More.

Dr. Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from SVCE, Madras University (1998), an MS (By Research) from IIT Madras in 2001 and a PhD from IIT Madras (2008). He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the LSIR Labs, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) for a year. He has done an internship in Siemens Corporate Research in Bangalore and was with another product development company – Oracle for three years, He subsequently spent a year as principal architect position with GTO, the research arm of Cognizant in Chennai, where he led the Extreme Processing group within the High Performance Computing Centre of Excellence and created Intellectual property in the Big-Data space. He... Read More.

Dr. Nadav Aharony is co-founder and CEO at Behavio. He completed his PhD at the MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics group, where he investigated the use of mobile phones as social and behavioral sensors, conducted one of the largest mobile data experiments done in academia, and initiated the open source mobile sensing platform that became Funf.org. Nadav was also a Fellow at the MIT Center for Civic Media for 3 years, since its inception, where he worked on topics of mobile and social activism.

Most recently Nadav worked at Google, as a product manager in the Android team. He has over 10 years of industry experience in engineering, product management, and business development roles, in organizations ranging from startups to... Read More.

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker, tinkerer, and journalist who has been thinking about the Internet of Things, which he thinks is broken.

He is the author of a number of books, and from time to time he also stands in front of cameras. You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things or deploying sensors to measure them. He recently rolled out a mesh network of 500 sensor motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O. He’s still recovering.

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn’t sure... Read More.

Tasso Argyros is the founder and CEO of ActionIQ, an enterprise software company that aims to bridge the gap between marketing and data for the Global 2000. He is also a venture partner at First Mark Capital and a cofounder of DataElite Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage fund focused on big data companies. Previously, Tasso cofounded big data pioneer Aster Data (acquired by Teradata), after dropping out of the PhD program at Stanford, and served as copresident and general manager of Teradata’s Big Data Division. Tasso has received several awards and recognitions, including Businessweek’s best young tech entrepreneur for 2009, the World Economic Forum’s technology pioneer in 2010, and Forbes’s next-gen innovator in 2013. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford... Read More.

Bahman is doing his PhD at Stanford University, supported by William R. Hewlett Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and focused on the topic of algorithms for big data applications, in which he is a well-published author in some of the best conferences and journals, including PVLDB, SIGMOD, WWW, and KDD. He was the last PhD student of the legendary late Rajeev Motwani, and has been also advised and co-advised by Ashish Goel and Prabhakar Raghavan (formerly Yahoo VP of Strategy, currently Google VP of Engineering). His industry experience during his PhD studies spans several internships and collaborations with some of the best researchers and practitioners from Twitter, Microsoft Research, Yahoo Research, AOL, and Google. He is a recipient of the Yahoo Key... Read More.

Michael Bailey is an Economist and Researcher at Facebook and leads advertising demand forecasting. He joins a small group of economists specializing in Big Data economics and developing distributed economics algorithms. He graduated from Stanford with a PhD in Economics where he studied applied econometrics and internet economics. While a graduate student, he developing forecasting models for businesses including the International Student Forecasting Analytics Model (ISAFM).

Chaitan Baru is Distinguished Scientist and Associate Director Data Initiatives at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego, where he also directs the Center for Large-scale Data Systems Research (CLDS). Baru’s interests are in research and development in the areas of parallel database systems, scientific data management, data analytics, and the challenges of data-driven science and data-driven enterprises. Baru has played a leadership role in a number of national-scale cyberinfrastructure R&D efforts across a wide range of science disciplines from earth sciences to ecology, biomedical informatics, and healthcare. Prior to joining SDSC in 1996, Baru led one of the development teams at IBM for an early UNIX-based shared-nothing database systems (DB2 Parallel Edition) and also led a team... Read More.

As Chief Product Officer, Sharren Bates is responsible for the vision, strategy, design and development of inBloom products and services.

Prior to joining inBloom in February 2013, Sharren’s excitement about the power of personalized learning and deep understanding of barriers to entry and innovation in the sector led her to her previous role as Senior Program Officer on the Next Generation Models team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There she was one of the Foundation’s lead representatives on the Shared Learning Collaborative, and spearheaded the development of the inBloom technology services.

Prior to the Gates Foundation, Sharren worked on education policy at the federal level as an education analyst working on the National Broadband Plan at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Previously,... Read More.

Michael Bean is co-founder and president Forio Simulations, a software company specializing in developing web simulations that improve decision-making. Michael has consulted with corporations and government agencies and conducted scenario planning and computer simulation seminars to corporations and government agencies worldwide.

Dr Tyler Bell is Director of Product for Factual, an LA-based startup that has created a data platform powering local commerce – now with data on 63 million businesses and landmarks, and 500 thousand products. He previously did post-doctoral work on landscape analysis and the semantic integration of heterogeneous data at the University of Oxford. More recently and topically, he led Product for Yahoo’s Geo Technologies Group. He writes about data-, semantic- and geo-technologies for O’Reilly Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/tylerb/

Milind Bhandarkar was the founding member of the team at Yahoo! that took Apache Hadoop from 20-node prototype to datacenter-scale production system, and has been contributing and working with Hadoop since version 0.1.0. He started the Yahoo! Grid solutions team focused on training, consulting, and supporting hundreds of new migrants to Hadoop. Parallel programming languages and paradigms has been his area of focus for over 20 years. He worked at the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets, Siebel Systems, Pathscale Inc. (acquired by QLogic), Yahoo! and Linkedin. Currently, he is the Chief Scientist at Greenplum, a division of EMC.

Dr. Bhatia is a Big Data and HPC specialist at Amazon Web Services working with customers to identify, architect and deploy big data solutions. Prior to Amazon, Dr. Bhatia worked at a number of leading government and university research labs focused on building novel distributed systems primarily for scientific domains.

Marie Bienkowski is the Deputy Director of the Center for Technology in Learning, at the nonprofit research organization, SRI International. She works with educational researchers to develop and evaluate technology in K-12 education, and to contribute research data to education policy discussions. Many of her projects involve efforts to interest underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers with a focus on computer science. She leads software projects in the areas of learning resource analytics and intelligent information management. Dr. Bienkowski co-authored the report “Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics” for the U.S. Department of Education (released in October 2012). She is the co-PI of an NSF-funded grant on assessing computational thinking for high school students and... Read More.

Bill Schmarzo, author of the upcoming Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business, to be published by Wiley, is responsible for setting the strategy and defining the service line offerings and capabilities for the EMC Consulting Enterprise Information Management and Analytics service line. He’s written several white papers and is a frequent speaker on the use of big data and advanced analytics to power an organization’s key business initiatives.

Bill has more than two decades of experience in data warehousing, BI, and analytics applications. Bill authored the Business Benefits Analysis methodology that links an organization’s strategic business initiatives with their supporting data and analytic requirements, and co-authored with Ralph Kimball a series of articles on analytic applications. Bill has served on The Data... Read More.

Billy is responsible for the day-to-day operations of DataStax. He has 20 years of experience in the database industry in roles ranging from DBA to senior executive. Prior to DataStax, Billy spent 6 years at Quest Software, a provider of systems management software, where his most recent role was VP and GM of the database business unit. Under his leadership, the industry-leading Quest database business grew from supporting traditional relational databases to a portfolio that now includes tools for cloud, NoSQL, columnar, and Hadoop databases, as well as business intelligence offerings. Prior to Quest, Billy led product teams for Embarcadero Technologies’ database productivity solutions. Billy holds a bachelor of science in computer science from the University of Louisville.

Cecilia Stewart is Vice President, Global Business Intelligence, Market & Customer Insights at The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a leader in global payment services.

Western Union provides consumers and businesses with fast, reliable and convenient ways to send and receive money around the world, to send payments and to purchase money orders. Western Union services are offered through a combined network of more than 500,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories. In 2011, Western Union completed 226 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, moving US$73 billion of principal between consumers.

As leader of the global business intelligence function at Western Union, Cecilia is responsible for the design and delivery of market and competitive intelligence, leveraging big data capabilities. She leads the charge in how... Read More.

San Francisco-based software engineer, authNZ geek, data geek, and graph geek Ryan Boyd is director of developer relations for Neo4j, an open source graph database that powers connected data analysis in data journalism, cancer resource, and some of the world’s top companies. Previously, he was head of developer relations for Google Cloud Platform and worked on over 20+ different APIs and developer products during his eight years at Google. Ryan is the author of Getting Started with OAuth 2.0 by O’Reilly. Now that he has a young daughter, he no longer skydives but still enjoys the adventures of sailing and cycling.

Feilding Cage is an interactive designer for the Guardian’s US in New
York. Recent work includes state-by-state visualizations of US gun
laws (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jan/15/gun-laws-united-states)
and gay rights (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2012/may/08/gay-rights-united-states),
and live election results from the primaries through the general
election (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2012/feb/28/republican-delegate-count-2012-nominees#view=states).
Feilding’s work has been honored with a 2012 Online Journalism Award
and is nominated for a Glaad Media Award. Before coming to the
Guardian, Feilding was an interactive designer at Time.com and the
supervising interactive developer at Associated Press. He is a 2006
graduate of UNC’s school of journalism and mass communication and is a
master’s degree candidate at NYU.

David Campbell is a Microsoft Technical Fellow whose present role is Vice President of Product Development for the SQL Server product suite.

David graduated with a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering (Robotics) from Clarkson University in 1984 and began working on robotic workcells for Sanders Associates – later a division of Lockheed Corporation. In 1990 he joined Digital Equipment Corporation where he worked on their Codasyl database product DECDBMS as well as their relational database product; Rdb.

Upon joining Microsoft in 1994, David was a developer and architect on the SQL Server Storage Engine team that was principally responsible for rewriting the core engine of SQL Server for SQL Server Version 7.0.

Aaron is a software engineer currently located in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his Ph.D. in 2007, developing algorithms and software for 3D medical image analysis. He currently leads a software development team at Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on web application development and cloud systems.

Aaron is a polyglot programmer, with a keen interest in open source technologies. Some favorite technologies at the moment include Node.js, Python/Django, MongoDB, and Redis.

Mr. Collis is the Chief Technical Officer of AWhere Inc. He has over 15 years’ experience in all phases of design, development and management of software development projects for desktop and web applications. He has an education in Engineering Science and Computer Science with a focus on spatial information systems and remote sensing and applied experience in agricultural research science and natural resource management applications. He has experience developing software for use and distribution in developing countries and has worked on a variety of software and database development projects with various international research organizations, NGO’s and in-country government departments. More recently his focus has been on development of integrated spatial intelligence systems and user interfaces to allow non-technical users access to the enormous power of... Read More.

Eric Colson is Chief Analytics Officer at a Stitch Fix. For more than 18 years, he has led data-oriented teams that span algorithms & machine learning, Big Data & data warehousing, and analytics & business intelligence. Prior to Stitch Fix Colson was Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix. He holds degrees in Information Systems and Economics.

Shaun has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, with a track record of building early stage and midsize software companies into successful market leaders. Shaun was previously VP of Product Strategy at VMware where he focused on defining VMware’s cloud application platform vision. Shaun has also held VP and Director level positions at SpringSource, Red Hat, JBoss, Princeton Softech, HP, Bluestone Software, and Primavera Systems. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University. Follow Shaun on Twitter: @shaunconnolly.

Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA, and a Visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab, in the Center for Civic Media. Prior to moving to Boston, Kate was an Associate Professor and Deputy Director the the Centre for Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

For ten years, Kate Crawford has published widely on the social, political and cultural practices that surround and inform media technologies. She has conducted large-scale studies of mobile and social media use at sites around the world, including India, the US and Australia. Her book on technology, culture and generational critique, ‘Adult Themes’, won the Manning Clark Cultural Award. Her current projects include the politics of big data,... Read More.

Liz is the CTO at Birchbox an ecommere company that is changing the way people discover products. She has published papers on topics ranging from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Robotics. Liz has a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and is a co-organizer of CTO School.

Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur with a background in web performance, analytics, cloud computing, and business strategy. In 2001, he cofounded Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011) and has since helped launch Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, and several other early-stage companies. He works with startups on business acceleration and advises a number of larger companies on innovation and technology. A sought-after public speaker on data-driven innovation and the impact of technology on society, Alistair has founded and run a variety of conferences, including Cloud Connect, Bitnorth, and the International Startup Festival, and is the chair of O’Reilly’s Strata Data Conference. He has written several books on technology and business, including the best-selling Lean Analytics. Alistair tries to mitigate his chronic ADD by writing... Read More.

Sandra Crucianelli is a Knight International Journalism Fellow who is an investigative journalist and instructor. She specializes in digital resources and data journalism. She is the founder and editor of Sololocal.Info, an online magazine that provides hyper-local news in Bahía Blanca City, Argentina, and has been an instructor and consultant for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas, Austin, since 2004. Crucianelli also is an instructor for Florida International University’s International Media Center and the author of Digital Tools for Journalists, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language resource. She is on the advisory board of the Digital Journalism Center at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She was one of the first journalists working outside Argentina’s capital to focus on investigative... Read More.

I create interactive data visualizations. Prior to that, I have been in charge of storytelling with data and the visualization effort for OECD, and before that, I managed a videogames development studio. I hold an MBA from the University of Texas as Austin and a masters degree from EM Lyon.

Kenneth Cukier is a senior editor overseeing data and digital products of the Economist. Previously, he was the paper’s Tokyo correspondent and before that, its technology correspondent in London. Kenneth is the coauthor of the award-winning book Big Data: A Revolution that Transforms How We Work, Live and Think, a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into over 20 languages, as well as a regular commentator in the media on business and technology and a frequent public speaker on trends in big data.

William Cukierski is a data scientist at Kaggle. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University, where he studied applications of machine learning in cancer research. Prior to joining Kaggle, he finished competitively in predictive data competitions on topics ranging from predicting stock movements, to forecasting grocery shopping, to automated essay grading.

Raanan is responsible for Big Data Product Marketing at Splunk. He is focused on helping customers harness their big machine data to gain operational intelligence and driving an effective market-driven product strategy. Raanan has spent the past 10 years focused on data, information and distributed systems. Prior to Splunk, Raanan worked at Cloudera where he was a Hadoop sales engineer and before that, spent 9 years as an engineer and sales engineer at Oracle. Raanan is a certified Hadoop developer and administrator and holds a BS in Computer Science and MS in Management.

Brandon Daniels is the President of Managed Services for Clutch Group. Brandon leads the organization’s strategy for all commercial and operational aspects of our Litigation & Investigation, Compliance & Risk, and Corporate In-house Services. Brandon has an extensive background in the management and application of legal technology. Over the last decade, he has focused on applying technology to legal services in order to create efficiency, increase quality, and reduce risk for corporations. He has managed the development or acquisition and implementation of knowledge management, performance tracking, data room, and litigation support software systems. He has also led the creation of facilities and technology environments that have withstood both risk and security audits from some of the largest investment banks, bioscience companies, and technology corporations in... Read More.

Carson is a mechanical engineer from MIT with additional expertise in computer science and electrical engineering. He worked previously at Cool Earth Solar and Alliance H. Inc., where he created testing and data systems as well as designed and manufactured prototypes for various products. Additionally, he worked for several years on the MIT Formula SAE Race Car Team, where he designed car-specific dual independent suspension systems. In his role at Rest, he leads the team’s electronic and web development.

Joydeep has worked in the enterprise software industry for over 20 years in leadership roles in engineering and product management. As an engineer, he led several R&D projects building enterprise DBMS products at Sybase and Informix. In his product management role, he currently leads and manages SAP’s HANA In-memory DBMS and Sybase branded data management portfolio with a focus on big data analytics and transaction processing segments. Joydeep is a frequent speaker at tradeshows, user conferences, customer presentations, and webcasts. Joydeep has also authored several articles in leading publications.

Tathagata Das is an Apache Spark committer and a member of the PMC. He is the lead developer behind Spark Streaming, which he started while a PhD student in the UC Berkeley AMPLab, and is currently employed at Databricks. Prior to Databricks, Tathagata worked at the AMPLab, conducting research about data-center frameworks and networks with Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica.

John A. De Goes has been working professionally in distributed systems design and development for more than a decade. Author of multiple best-selling technical books, and a major contributor to open source, John has an extensive background in in scientific and distributed computing, and large-scale analytics. John is a frequent and well-received speaker at industry events. Recent engagements include Strata, DeveloperWeek, MongoDB Conference, DataWeek Conference, Glue Conference, Frontier Developers and NEScala. As CEO and CTO of Precog, John is responsible for leading the design and development of the company’s data warehousing and analysis platform.

Marc Demarest is CEO and a principal in Noumenal, Inc., an international management consulting firm based in the Pacific Northwest and the UK that provides a range of management and technical consulting services to high-tech, biotech, nanotech, and greentech firms. Widely known as an early proponent of data marting and tiered enterprise data warehousing models, Demarest is currently writing a book on nontechnical aspects of enterprise data warehousing.

Jeff Denworth has over a decade of experience with advanced computation and massively scalable big data storage technologies. Before joining DDN in 2006, Mr. Denworth ran worldwide sales and marketing at Cluster File Systems, Inc. – where he managed all aspects of sales & business development associated with the Lustre® file system. Prior to Cluster File Systems, Jeff managed the HPC and enterprise server memory business development at Dataram Corporation.

Rahul has a unique blend of Web Analytics strategy, Business Intelligence and marketing experience. He is currently Director – Web Intelligence Product Marketing at Splunk Inc. Previously, he was Sr. Manger – Search Analytics at eBay. Rahul led a team of analyst that worked on analytics and optimization for Product Based Experience, Catalogs, Vertical search, Fitment, Classification and Advertising. Prior to eBay, Rahul was an Independent Web Strategy consultant focused on Social Media. His past experience includes Director of Analytics and Optimization for Ask.com and Dell. Rahul has served on the Client Advisory board for Hitwise and has spoken at Google, Strata Velocity, eMetrics and number of industry events.

Parviz Deyhim is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. Parviz focuses on big data and Hadoop related topics and works with different customers to help them identify and architect their big data workload on Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce.

Ted Dunning is chief application architect at MapR Technologies. He’s also a board member for the Apache Software Foundation, a PMC member and committer of the Apache Mahout, Apache Zookeeper, and Apache Drill projects, and a mentor for various incubator projects. Ted has years of experience with machine learning and other big data solutions across a range of sectors. He has contributed to clustering, classification, and matrix decomposition algorithms in Mahout and to the new Mahout Math library and designed the t-digest algorithm used in several open source projects and by a variety of companies. Previously, Ted was chief architect behind the MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems and built fraud-detection systems for ID Analytics (LifeLock). Ted has coauthored a number of... Read More.

Dr. Khaled El Emam is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine, a senior investigator at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, and a Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa. His main area of research is developing techniques for health data anonymization and secure disease surveillance for public health purposes. Previously Khaled was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada, and prior to that he was head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has co-founded two companies to commercialize the results of his research work. In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by... Read More.

Byron joined LivePerson in April as Chief Data Scientist where he works on improving LivePerson’s intelligent targeting solutions and developing new data products. Prior to joining to LivePerson he spent over 4 years at adBrite, an online advertising exchange, where he held a number of roles related to leveraging the large amount of data generated by adBrite’s exchange. He holds a PhD in Statistics from Harvard University where he studied structure learning for Bayesian Networks with applications to the Life Sciences.

Stephan Ellner has been a software engineer in Google’s ads infrastructure team since 2004, focusing on stream processing and low-latency distributed query execution. Stephan currently manages the teams developing the F1 database and related extraction and reporting systems. He holds Master’s degrees in computer science and classical music from Rice University.

Justin Erickson is a senior director of product management leading Cloudera’s platform team, which is responsible for the components in Cloudera Distribution, including Hadoop (CDH) above storage. Previously, he led the high-availability and disaster-recovery areas of Microsoft SQL Server.

Tim Estes is the president and founder of Digital Reasoning, a leader in trusted cognitive computing. Driven by the belief that all software can learn and that all people should have access to it, Tim and his team work closely with leaders in government and industry to solve extraordinarily valuable and morally compelling problems in national security, finance, healthcare, and other markets by automating the understanding of human communication.

Susan Etlinger is an industry analyst at Altimeter. Her research focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence, data and advanced technologies on business and culture and is used in university curricula around the world. Susan’s TED talk, “What Do We Do With All This Big Data?,” has been translated into 25 languages and has been viewed more than 1.2 million times. She is a sought-after keynote speaker and has been quoted in such media outlets as the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the New York Times.

Shelley Evenson recently joined Fjord as Executive Director, Organisational Evolution. As a leader in service design and with more than 25 years of experience, Shelley Evenson is adept at helping organizations develop an in-depth understanding of customer needs, building experience strategies that respond to those needs, and implementing strategies across platforms and channels.

Shelley formerly oversaw research for user experience and design at Facebook and was a Principal User Experience Designer and Manager for Microsoft. Shelley was also an Associate Professor at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where her projects included collaborations with GM, Intel, The Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Motorola, and UPMC.

Robert Faludi is the Chief Innovator at Digi International. His job is forging strong connections with the maker community, uncovering new innovation methodologies, supporting outstanding new work, and creating prototypes to spur new product development. Faludi also works as a professor in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and in the Interactive Telecommunications graduate program at NYU. He specializes in behavioral interactions through physical computing and networked objects. Rob is the author of Building Wireless Sensor Networks, with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino and Processing published by O’Reilly Media, 2011. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Good Morning America, BBC World, the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry and MoMA among others.... Read More.

John Feland is the award winning founder and CEO of Argus Insights. With background in both industrial and component-level design, carrier influences, and OEM collaboration, Feland brings his expert knowledge and perspective on product design to to Argus Insights,

In 2009-2010, Feland was the Executive Director for Stanford University’s ME310 Design Innovation course. In 2008, Feland served as Chief Technologist for SK Telecom America’s R&D Group. Prior to SKTA, Feland led Synaptics’ marketing division to help handset manufacturers integrate next-generation capabilities. Feland was the principle architect for the Onyx Concept Phone, the world’s first capacitive multi-touch mobile experience. Feland holds an S.B. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering... Read More.

Julia Ferraioli is a senior developer advocate with Google Cloud Platform. Julia is a polyglot, though in code only, and is excited about machine learning, containers, whiskey, and sprinkles (in roughly that order). Her super powers are finding ways to incorporate her interests into her work and estimating how much stuff can fit inside a container.

Lutz is co-founder and director of Fisheye Analytics, a media data mining company. An expert on social data analytics, he has supported NGO’s such as the World Economic Forum and the Olympic Committee as well as numerous government agencies.

Previously, Lutz founded and built up an European accelerator for Ericsson and has worked as a senior marketing manager for Dell’s online business in Europe. Lutz has a Masters degree in Quantum Physics and a MBA from INSEAD.

Barry Fischer is the Head Writer/Editor of Opower’s big-data and energy blog, “Outlier,” which leverages energy usage data across 50 million US households. Prior to his current role, Barry was part of Opower’s engagement management team, which works with 80 utility companies to empower millions of customers to understand their energy usage. Barry earned a BA in economics and MS in environmental engineering from Stanford University, and subsequently completed a Fulbright Fellowship in New Zealand, where he investigated opportunities for renewable energy in the Pacific islands. His work on island energy development has appeared in the journal Energy. You can follow Barry on Twitter @OpowerOutlier.

Johanna is a data scientist and project manager at Blue Yonder, specialized in demand forecasting in the retail industry. She has worked on projects with major retailers. She holds a PhD in high energy physics.

Previously, Johanna worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland (CERN) where she gained her deep experience with big data, predictive analytics, and machine learning.

John holds a graduate degree in Operations Research from MIT and has worked as an analytics consultant for the Department of Defense, Coca-Cola, Royal Caribbean International, and Intercontinental Hotels Group. His expertise is in optimization modeling, revenue management, and predictive modeling.

Natasha Gajic is currently Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) Specialist – Technical Architecture Lead at Rackspace. Natasha has been working in the computer industry since 1988 in various roles around software design, database administration, system development and consulting. Currently, Natasha is leading an engineering effort on Rackspace OpenStack Big Data solution called Analytical Compute Grid. Before joining Rackspace, Natasha worked for 10 years as a consultant on various projects in Toronto, Canada. There she implemented the Ontario Major Case Management system, which is a province-wide intelligence system for criminal investigations. Natasha holds a patent on Data Management and Indexing across a Distributed Database in the Cloud. She holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering degree from Military Technical University in Zagreb, Croatia.

Nicolas Garcia Belmonte ( @philogb ) works as a Data Visualization Scientist at Twitter. Nicolas creates advanced data visualizations using web standards like HTML5, WebGL and 2D Canvas. He is also the author of PhiloGL and the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit two frameworks for creating interactive data visualizations for the Web. His frameworks and visualizations have been used and featured in a variety of companies and places including Google, Mozilla, Ars Technica and FastCompany.

Yael Garten is director of data science at LinkedIn, where she leads a team that focuses on understanding and increasing growth and engagement of LinkedIn’s 400 million members across mobile and desktop consumer products. Yael is an expert at converting data into actionable product and business insights that impact strategy. Her team partners with product, engineering, design, and marketing to optimize the LinkedIn user experience, creating powerful data-driven products to help LinkedIn’s members be productive and successful. Yael champions data quality at LinkedIn; she has devised organizational best practices for data quality and developed internal data tools to democratize data within the company. Yael also advises companies on informatics methodologies to transform high-throughput data into insights and is a frequent conference speaker. She holds a... Read More.

Alan is a co-founder of Hortonworks. He is an original member of the engineering team that took Pig from a Yahoo! Labs research project to a successful Apache open source project. Alan also designed HCatalog and guided its adoption as an Apache Incubator project. He is also the author of Programming Pig, a book from O’Reilly Press.

Ari Gesher is the founding director of software engineering at Kairos Aerospace, a startup building and operating the next-generation of airborne and spaceborne sensors for monitoring oil and gas infrastructure. Ari also serves as consulting architect for Jupiter, a company productizing high-quality datasets that describe the long-term effects of climate change. Previously, he was a very early engineer at Palantir Technologies and later served as Palantir’s engineering ambassador to the tech community at large; before Palantir, he was the maintainer of the SourceForge.net open source archive. Ari is the coauthor of The Architecture of Privacy, which explains how to responsibly hold data about people while preserving their privacy to the greatest extent possible. Ari is a frequent speaker on various topics,... Read More.

Rayid Ghani is a Research Director and Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is also the co-founder of Edgeflip, an analytics and social media startup that is focused on helping non-profits, advocacy groups, and charities do better fundraising, volunteer recruiting, outreach and advocacy. Previously, Rayid was the Chief Scientist for the Obama 2012 Election Campaign focusing on analytics, data, and technology.

Rayid is currently focused on using data, analytics (and other related buzzwords ) for social causes, both with Edgeflip and the University of Chicago. Rayid created and runs the Eric & Wendy Schmidt “Data Science for Social Good” Summer Fellowship which brings together aspiring data scientists to work on data science... Read More.

Brian Granger is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Cal Poly State
University in San Luis Obispo, CA and co-founder of Chronicle Labs. He has a background in theoretical
atomic, molecular and optical physics, with a Ph.D from the University of Colorado. His current research interests
include quantum computing, parallel and distributed computing and
interactive computing environments for scientific and technical computing. He is a core developer of the
IPython project and is an active contributor to a number of other open source projects focused on scientific computing in Python.

Alexander Gray is an associate professor at Georgia Tech and the CEO of Skytree, Inc. His research focuses on scaling up all of the major practical methods of machine learning (ML) to massive datasets. Alex began working on this problem at NASA in 1993 (long before the current fashionable talk of big data). His large-scale algorithms helped enable the top scientific breakthrough of 2003 and have won a number of research awards.

Alex served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Analysis of Massive Data and frequently gives invited tutorial lectures on massive-scale ML at top research conferences and agencies. Alexander has degrees in applied mathematics and computer science from UC Berkeley and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

Lisa Green is the Director at the Common Crawl Foundation where she oversees the foundation’s mission of building, maintaining and openly disseminating a comprehensive crawl of the web. Prior to joining Common Crawl, she was the Chief of Staff at Creative Commons. Lisa holds a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of California Berkeley, lives in San Francisco and is passionate about open systems.

Garrett Grolemund is the editor-in-chief of shiny.rstudio.com, the development center for the Shiny R package, and is the author of Hands-On Programming with R as well as Data Science with R, a forthcoming book by O’Reilly Media. Garrett works as a data scientist and chief instructor for RStudio, Inc.

Dr. Nagui Halim’s technical vision and leadership launched the era of stream computing at IBM. In response to a client request in 2003 to create a new architecture for high-speed adaptive stream processing and analytics, Nagui recruited and assumed leadership of a large interdisciplinary research team, working in close and novel collaboration with the client, to undertake this formidable project to develop a new type of computing system able to manage and analyze massive volumes of continuous streams of data, which became known as System S. As the technical lead on System S, Nagui developed the foundational concepts and designed the architecture for this new computing system.

Ben Hamner is responsible for data analysis, machine learning, and competitions at Kaggle. He has worked with machine learning problems in a variety of different domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, web classification, and neuroscience. Prior to joining Kaggle, he applied machine learning to improve brain-computer interfaces as a Whitaker Fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. He graduated with a BSE in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Math from Duke University.

Jeanne Harris is the Global Managing Director of Information Technology Research and Executive Research Fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance in Chicago. Jeanne leads the Institute’s global research agenda, which currently includes data monetization strategies, embedding Big Data analytics, and understanding and exploiting digital experiences. She is co-author of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” and “Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results” from Harvard Business School Press. She is on the faculty of Columbia University and is the recipient of Consulting Magazine’s Women Leaders in Consulting Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009.

Bert Haskell is Technology Director of Pecan Street Project Inc., a smart grid research and development organization headquartered at The University of Texas at Austin. After being assigned to the MCC Consortium by Eastman Kodak, Mr. Haskell spent nearly a decade working for the consortium, rising to the position of MCC’s Vice President of Portable Electronics Product Research. In addition to his work for Kodak and MCC, he has held product development, product marketing and advisory rolls at a number of start-up companies including Stellar Display Corporation, Wireless Age, Motion Computing, Portelligent. Prior to joining Pecan Street Project, he was Director of Product Development for Heliovolt, a developer of CIGS based thin-film photovoltaic modules. Mr. Haskell holds a Masters in Mechanical Engineering... Read More.

Amy is the Director of Mathematics at Quid, where she has been since its inception, prototyping and launching the company’s technology for analyzing document sets. A Cambridge Mathematician who previously worked in London modeling cities, Amy is fascinated by complex human systems, and the algorithms and data that help us understand them.

Joseph M. Hellerstein is the Jim Gray Chair of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and cofounder and CSO at Trifacta. Joe’s work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan fellow, and the recipient of three ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time awards for his research. He has been listed by Fortune among the 50 smartest people in technology, and MIT Technology Review included his work on their TR10 list of the 10 technologies most likely to change our world.

Paul Henderson is Head of Business and Clinical Intelligence for Ascribe. In the UK, 82% of National Health Service organisations own at least one Ascribe solution from a portfolio of point-of-care and operational management offerings. Over 130 organisations use BI provided by Paul’s team, which has recently expanded to cover mainland Europe and Asia-Pacific. With a background in qualitative research Paul’s ethos is to provide solutions that identify variation in clinical and operational practice, drive service transformation and improve the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of services bought and delivered in the geographies his team serves. Last year Ascribe were Microsoft’s global Healthcare Partner of the Year, based on their ability to take innovation and make it immediately relevant, which is exactly what the team are... Read More.

James Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Head of the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), serves as a Director of the UK’s charitable Web Science Trust and is a visiting Professor at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Hendler is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. In 2010, Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an “Internet Web Expert” by the US government.

Dave is responsible for assisting Pentaho’s corporate customers and technology partners with the evaluation, development and deployment of big data strategies and solutions. He has nearly 20 years of experience with database technologies, data warehousing and business intelligence and has held a variety of senior positions including business development, product marketing, pre-sales management and professional services at Sagent, Temtec and PLATINUM technology. Dave has been with Pentaho since its commercial inception. He holds a Masters degree in Information Science from the University of North Texas and is a lifelong sailor.

Jeremy Howard is a serial entrepreneur, business strategist, developer, and educator. He is the CEO of Enlitic, a startup he founded to use recent advances in machine learning to transform the practice of medicine and bring modern medical diagnostics to billions of people in the developing world for the first time. He is the youngest faculty member at Singularity University, where he teaches data science, and is also a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum.

Previously, Jeremy was the president and chief scientist of Kaggle, a community and competition platform for over 150,000 data scientists. Before working at Kaggle, he was the top-ranked participant in data science competitions globally in 2010 and 2011. He founded two successful Australian startups (the email provider... Read More.

Alysa Z. Hutnik is a partner in the Advertising & Marketing and Privacy & Information Security practices at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP in Washington, D.C. Her practice includes representing clients in all forms of consumer protection matters, from counseling to defending regulatory investigations and litigation. Her specific focus is on privacy, data security, and advertising law, including unfair and deceptive practices, electronic and mobile commerce and data sharing. Ms. Hutnik is past chair of the ABA’s Privacy and Information Security Committee (Section of Antitrust), the co-chair of the Section’s 2011 Consumer Protection Conference, and was the editor-in-chief of the ABA’s Data Security Handbook, a practical guide for data security legal practitioners. For more information, visit www.KelleyDrye.com, subscribe to the “www.AdLawAccess.com”: www.AdLawAccess.com blog,... Read More.

Noah Iliinsky is a senior UX architect with Amazon Web Services. Noah strongly believes in the power of intentionally crafted communication and has spent the last decade researching, writing, and speaking about best practices for designing visualizations, informed by his graduate work in user experience and interaction design. Most recently, he worked on Amazon QuickSight. Noah is the coauthor of Designing Data Visualizations and technical editor of, and a contributor to, Beautiful Visualization, both published by O’Reilly Media. He is also a frequent speaker for both industry and academia. Noah holds a master’s degree in technical communication from the University of Washington and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Reed College.

Sasha Issenberg is the author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.” He is columnist for Slate and the Washington correspondent for Monocle, where he covers politics, business, diplomacy, and culture. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Inc., The Atlantic, Boston, Philadelphia, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. His first book, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, was published by Gotham in 2007.

Girish Juneja is CTO of Datacenter Software Division and General Manager of the Big data and Expressway software businesses. Girish has over 21 year experience in building software businesses, at Intel, as an entrepreneur and earlier at Verizon Telecommunications.

Prior to his current position, he was the Director of Application Security & Identity Products in the Software Services Division in SSG. In this role he was responsible for conceptualization, product development, sales & marketing of Intel Expressway software product line for Service Providers, ISVs, OEMs and select end-users. Girish also led the development of Identity software strategy for SSG that led to acquisition of Nordic Edge, development & launch of McAfee Identity Manager & Intel CloudSSO Identity-as-a-Service offering in collaboration with Salesforce.com.

Eron Kelly is a 12 year veteran of Microsoft with a broad set of experiences in product management across the Microsoft Office and Server and Tools Divisions. He is currently the General Manager responsible for product marketing for Microsoft SQL Server and the Data Platform. In this capacity he leads core product marketing, technical readiness, and value proposition for the Data Platform. Before leading the SQL product marketing team, he was a General Manager in the Windows Azure group leading an incubation effort focused on Microsoft’s commerce platform.

Prior to that, he led the product management team for Office 365, the fastest growing business in Microsoft’s history. As the founding member of the product management team, he led the development of the initial... Read More.

Jim Kelly leads Quantcast’s R&D team, which works on both adding computing capacity through cluster software innovations and using it up through new analytic and modeling products. Having been at Quantcast for six years, he has seen its data volumes and processing challenges grow from zero to petabytes and led technical and organizational changes that have kept Quantcast a step ahead. Previously he held engineering leadership roles at Oracle, Kana, and Scopus Technology (acquired by Siebel). Jim holds a PhD in physics from Princeton University.

Greg is the Business Development Manager for Big Data at Intel Corporation. He has over 10 years of in-depth experience in business intelligence and data warehousing at Oracle and Business Objects (now SAP). A former U.S. Army officer, Greg holds a master’s degree in Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Josh has been working with data and analytics since 2000, including being the product manager for the first “Datamart in a Box” (Broadbase) and running product management for one of the largest Data and Analytics operations in the world (Yahoo!). Josh is now applying these learnings at Pivotal, where he is building the industry’s first unified Big Data and Analytics Platform.

Jace Kohlmeier is the Dean of Analytics at Khan Academy. He earned degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science as a Kansas State Wildcat, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Princeton. He spent six years at Citadel Investment Group, where he cofounded the High Frequency Trading group and oversaw its trading in fixed income, currency, commodities and futures. He is also the cofounder of Teza Technologies, where he served as President and Head of Quantitative Research. After volunteering in 2010, he joined Khan Academy full-time on a mission to apply state-of-the-art data science toward optimized learning.

Nick is the lead data scientist at Accenture working with executives to build global data science capabilities across the company. Nick and his team operate like Navy Seals focused on quick win execution. They are regularly inserted into Fortune 500 companies with ugly data and limited infrastructure. In a short span of time they work with executives to develop strategies around data science and then rapidly assemble and deploy the solutions. Engagement with a wide variety of business problems and domains has led Nick to hone his tool set for efficiency. He also founded the Data Science Linux project, a clean cut linux distribution for data scientists. Nick holds a BS in statistics and a BA in computer... Read More.

Eugene Kolker is Chief Data Officer at Seattle Children’s and Head of the Bioinformatics & High-throughput Analysis Laboratory at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In 2001, he co-founded OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology and served as its Editor-in-Chief through 2012. He is now Executive Editor of OMICS. In 2011, Eugene co-founded DELSA Global (Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance) a non-for-profit organization and serves as its President. In 2012, he co-founded the Big Data journal and serves as its Executive Editor. Dr. Kolker has more than 25 years of transdisciplinary experience in data analysis, integration and dissemination, predictive analytics, software and algorithm development, and informatics. Eugene is also an Affiliate Professor at the Departments of Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education and Pediatrics at the... Read More.

Andy Konwinski is a postdoc in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley focused on large scale distributed computing and cluster scheduling. He co-created and is a committer on the Apache Mesos project that has been adopted by Twitter as their private cloud platform. He also worked with systems engineers and researchers at Google on Omega, their next generation cluster scheduling system. More recently, he lead the AMP Camp Big Data Bootcamp and has been contributing to the Spark project.

Mr. Krishnan is a recognized expert worldwide in the strategy, architecture and implementation of high performance data warehousing and big data solutions. He is a visionary data warehouse thought leader, ranked as one of the top data warehouse consultants in the world, and an independent analyst, writing and speaking at industry leading conferences, user groups and trade publications. He has authored eBooks, over 100 plus articles, viewpoints and case studies in Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Data Warehouse Appliances and Architectures.

A recognized authority on Unstructured data integration, text mining and text analytics. Along with Bill Inmon, he is promoting the next generation of data warehousing and business intelligence around BIG Data,Hadoop, NoSQL, Unstructured Data Integration and Social Intelligence.

As the co-founders and CTO of Infochimps, my mission is to build tools to organize, connect and comprehend massive information streams.

At Infochimps, we’ve built a cloud architecture capable of spinning up clusters as large as 60 nodes with the push of a button, using devops to make this possible with minimal distraction. We’re also the authors of Wukong, the most-used frameworks for Ruby streaming in Hadoop.

I am CTO and co-founder of infochimps.com, the leading big data platform in the cloud. At infochimps we’ve built a scalable architecture that allows app programmers and statisticians to quickly and confidently manipulate data streams at arbitrary scale — terabytes in size, thousands of events per second, dozens of disparate data sources. We use a mixture of Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Storm/Kafka, Goliath and other industrial-strength solutions.

My projects include Wukong, (the most-used frameworks for Ruby streaming in hadoop); Ironfan (cloud orcestration capable of spinning up clusters large or small at the push of a button); Configliere (ruby configuration made easy); and I’m a core committer to Goliath (liquid fast concurrent web framework).

I am the author of “Big Data for Chimps”, a book on data... Read More.

Michael Lang is CEO and founder of Revelytix. He has worked in various aspects of the enterprise information management space for 25 years, including roles at Reuters, Vitria, Metamatrix (founder and president, sold to Red Hat) and Revelytix. For the past 10 years he has worked closely with the U.S. Department of Defense innovating solutions to complex enterprise data management problems.

Justin is CEO of Zoomdata, Inc. Prior to Zoomdata, Justin was the co-founder of Clarabridge and the inventor of Clarabridge’s award-winning, patented, text analytics software.

Prior to Clarabridge, Justin co-founded and was CTO of Claraview, a BI strategy and technology consultancy, which was sold to Teradata in 2008. Before founding Claraview, Justin served as founder and CTO of Strategy.com, a real-time data analysis and alerting subsidiary of MicroStrategy.

Prior to launching Strategy.com, he was a technology program manager and consultant at MicroStrategy, designing the second-generation web-based BI tool for MicroStrategy, and working with large customers on their BI deployments.

In the early 1990′s Justin was active in the BBS community, and he authored and marketed the EIS-PC BBS system.... Read More.

Eric Legrand is a marketing scientist at Wells Fargo where he focuses on building tools to measure marketing performance. He has developed compelling analyses, visualizations, and dashboards that are used both by executives as well as operational managers. Previous to Wells Fargo Eric managed pricing and cost models at Niman Ranch, a leading natural meat company. Prior to Niman Ranch, he worked as a software developer at a number of start-ups that are no longer with us. Eric studied mathematics and philosophy at Wheaton College, IL, received a certificate in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, and is currently working on an MS in Predictive Analytics at Northwestern University. Eric lives with his wife and daughter in San Francisco, CA.

Greg Lindahl is the CTO and Founder at blekko, a new search engine. Prior to blekko, Greg was Founder and Distinguished Engineer at PathScale, at which he was the architect of the InfiniPath low-latency InfiniBand HCA, used to build tightly-coupled supercomputing clusters. Greg also worked on the GPLed EKOPath compiler suite. Prior to PathScale’s founding in 2001, he worked on commodity Linux clusters at HPTi, including the 1999 Forecast Systems Lab system, which was the first time a Linux cluster won a conventional supercomputing procurement. Prior to this, he worked on the Legion “grid” distributed OS project at the University of Virginia, and for D. E. Shaw & Co., a New York investment bank.

Ben Lloyd has been with NetApp for 6 years, and spent more than 25 years in IT, managing solution implementation projects, Quality, and Support teams. He’s managed or architected projects in Data Warehousing, SFA, Workflow Management, ERP, CRM, Web, Content Management, Fault Diagnosis, and Analytics. In 2011, he took a role in NetApp’s Customer Support organization managing the program to implement the next generation solution for handling NetApp’s phone-home application (AutoSupport).

Mark Madsen is a research analyst at Third Nature, where he advises companies on data strategy and technology planning, and the global head of architecture at Teradata, where he is responsible for understanding, forecasting, and defining the analytics landscape and architecture. Mark has designed analysis, data collection, and data management infrastructure for companies worldwide. He focuses on two types of work: the business applications of data and guiding the construction of data infrastructure. As a result, Mark does as much information strategy and IT architecture work as he does analytics.

Walt Maguire is the Analytics Director for ParAccel. Walt started working with data when Big Data meant less than a megabyte – writing his first analytic routines on an IBM XT he’d built from parts purchased at Fry’s Electronics in 1988. He built his first linux system before linux had a name – downloading the kernel from the University of Helsinki in the early 1990’s to systems built from parts. Since then, he has worked in analytics settings ranging from mainframe programming for academia to managing a multi-terabyte data infrastructure for an internet company to working with companies running petabyte–scale data warehouses. At one time or another he’s worked with most of the tools and technologies data management and analysis. His focus today is... Read More.

Justin Makeig is a Director of Product Management at MarkLogic where he oversees the suite of applications, tools, and APIs built around MarkLogic’s enterprise NoSQL database. He manages the company’s Hadoop strategy along with front-end application development and administration tools. Justin has over 10 years of experience designing, developing, and bringing to market data-driven applications for start-ups and large organizations using web and Big Data technologies. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Luis Maldonado is the Director of Product Management for HP Vertica where he is responsible for driving strategy and development of the Vertica product portfolio. He has over 20 years of experience developing and productizing infrastructure software and services. Prior to HP Vertica, Luis held product leadership roles for companies such as Akamai, Progress Software and DataSynapse (now TIBCO Software). Luis holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

Dean Malmgren is co-founder and managing partner of Datascope Analytics. As an author of several peer-reviewed publications on big data analytics and visualization, Dean is excited about bringing cutting-edge techniques out of research and into practice. When not teasing himself or others, Dean can be found swimming, cycling, or running for silly long distances. Dean received a BS in math and chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and a PhD in chemical engineering from Northwestern University.

Michael is a Developer Programs Engineer supporting developers who work with Google Cloud and Apps products. With many years of experience working on Internet media projects for non-profit organizations, he especially enjoys helping educational institutions “Go Google.” Michael has written for tech blog ProgrammableWeb.com, has spent time in rural Uganda researching mobile phone use, and has a Masters degree in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Steve Mardenfeld is a Data Engineer for the Big Data Team at Etsy, where he uses Hadoop and other tools to process and analyze large data sets. Previously to Etsy, he worked as a Senior Data Analyst for a criminal justice agency, where he focused on utilizing data to help inform criminal justice policy issues.

Sanjai Marimadaiah is the WW Business Leader for Big Data solutions in the Converged Application Systems division of Enterprise Group at HP. Sanjai manages the portfolio of solutions based on Hadoop, Vertica, Autonomy and emerging database software. He drives the strategy, product management and go-to-market activities. These solutions extend to the application the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy-the company’s approach for next-generation data centers that enables customers to increase agility, lower costs of operations and drive innovation into their businesses.

Mano joined Google’s Geo API team in 2006. He helps people all over
the world develop and deploy their content in KML and Google Maps,
working with large companies, small startups, and international aid
organizations. Before coming to Google, Mano had an eclectic career
that involved getting a Masters in History, a Masters in Information
Management and Systems, and working as a data manager in social service and public benefit organizations for over a decade.

Kate Matsudaira is an experienced CTO and has spent the last 7 years immersed in startups in architect and CTO roles. Prior to joining the startup world she spent time as a software engineer, and technical lead/manager at Amazon and Microsoft. Kate has a passion for big data and all the challenges that come with it. She has lot of experience building large scale distributed web systems, with some mobile, cloud computing and engineering leadership thrown in for good measure. She maintains a blog at http://katemats.com.

Wes McKinney is a software architect at Two Sigma Investments. He is the creator of Python’s pandas library and a PMC member for Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet. He wrote the book Python for Data Analysis. Previously, Wes worked for Cloudera and was the founder and CEO of DataPad.

Stephanie McReynolds is Vice President, Product and Marketing at ClearStory Data, which helps businesses analyze and explore Big Data from public and private sources. Previously, Stephanie was Senior Director of Product & Technical Marketing at Teradata Aster, where she brought to market the Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform. Stephanie joined Teradata through the acquisition of Aster Data.

Stephanie has more than a decade of experience in product management and marketing for business intelligence, data warehouse and complex event processing products at organizations including, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Business Objects.

Fernando Mesa is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience in the IT industry. At MarkLogic Fernando is responsible for the creation, communication and implementation of the technical vision for the company in the Enterprise space. He also provides strategic guidance to Enterprise organizations of all sizes from small startups to fortune 500 organizations. He has expertise in the implementation of emerging technologies in large scale systems and is a frequent speaker at technology events and conferences.

Prior to joining MarkLogic, Fernando worked at United Health Group, where he served as Vice President of Enterprise Architecture. He has also held a variety of senior roles in Media and Healthcare corporations.

Timothy Mohn is a entrepreneur and scientist with 20 years of technology experience. Previously he developed HBOGO, founded Pratt Institute’s Digital Arts Research Lab, and worked with a renowned design firm where he focused on replicating and enhancing physical architectural experiences in the cloud. He was one of the founders of MedNet Systems, a startup focused on a collaborative diagnosis platform for liver biopsy diagnosis and a cloud based certification platform for the FDA and large pharmaceutical organizations. Follow Tim on Twitter – @m3thdman.

Timothy’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and elsewhere and has won numerous awards from AIGA, ID Magazine, Critique Magazine and Communication Arts. He holds a MS from NYU where... Read More.

Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan is CEO & Founder of ClearStory Data, which helps businesses broaden insights by interactively exploring and analyzing Big Data from a combination of private, public/web and premium sources. Prior to ClearStory, Sharmila was EVP at Aster Data and prior to that, CMO of the largest business unit within HP Software and was responsible for a $3+ billion software products portfolio. Prior to HP, she was CMO/EVP at Opsware, where she joined Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to re-position Loudcloud into a software company and formed Opsware in 2002, which was eventually acquired by HP for $1.65 billion. She has also held executive positions at Netscape, Kiva Software which was acquired by Netscape, AOL and Totality.

Big data for a better world! Rob is the CEO of Idibon, who are tackling the problem of extracting information from unstructured speech and text in the world’s connected languages — all 5000 of them. His background includes building infrastructure in Sierra Leone and Liberia, running crowdsourced translation platforms for Haiti, and work in language processing technologies that support a number of Silicon Valley search-engines and start-ups. He has a PhD from Stanford University.

Sean Patrick Murphy, with degrees in mathematics, electrical engineering, and biomedical engineering and an MBA from Oxford University, has served as a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for the past ten years. Previously, he served as the Chief Data Scientist at WiserTogether, a series A funded health care analytics firm, and the Director of Research at Manhattan Prep, a boutique graduate educational company. He was also the co-founder and CEO of a big data-focused startup: CloudSpree.

Scott Murray is a code artist who writes software to create data visualizations and other interactive phenomena. His work incorporates elements of interaction design, systems design, and generative art. Scott is an assistant professor of design at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches data visualization and interaction design. He is a contributor to Processing and is the author of the forthcoming O’Reilly title Interactive Data Visualization for the Web.

Tim has authored and co-authored a number of books for O’Reilly including: Maven: The Definitive Guide, The Jakarta Commons Cookbook, Maven: A Developer’s Notebook, and Harnessing Hibernate. He has also written a number of popular open source books including: Maven by Example, Maven: The Complete Reference, Repository Management with Nexus, and The Maven Cookbook.

Tim focuses on helping developers understand various topics including development infrastructure, general architecture, and emerging approaches to persistence. He has contributed to open source projects at Apache.

Vadim Ogievetsky is a frontend developer at Metamarkets where he uses D3.js in a production, client-facing environment. Prior to Metamarkets, in 2008, he received a BA degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Oxford University and, in 2011, graduated from Stanford University with a Master’s degree in Computer Science specializing in Human Computer Interaction. While at Stanford he was part of the Data Visualization group where he contributed to Protovis. His open-source development is now focused on DVL, a reactive data
flow library for dynamic data visualization built on top of D3.js.

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, which is dedicated to the idea that government can work for the people, by the people, in the 21st century. She is an Ashoka fellow, and received the Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in 2012. Government Technology named her one of 2011’s Doers, Dreamers and Drivers in Public Sector Innovation and the Huffington Post named her the top Game Changer in Business and Technology the same year. She is known for her TED talk, Coding a Better Government, and is a frequent speaker. Previously, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’ReillyRead More.

Tim celebrates software development using many languages and frameworks, heeding less to past experience in choosing technologies. Spring MVC, Hibernate, Rails, .NETMVC, Django and the variety of languages that come with are in his L1 cache. Among other endeavors to keep him sharp, he currently provides coded solutions for the Software Engineering Institute at CMU.

Tim received a B.S. in Computer Engineering in 2003 and resides in Pittsburgh, PA.

Zach Pardos is a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring data driven methodologies to aid learners and educators using virtual learning environments. He earned his PhD in Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the Tutor Research Group in 2012. During his PhD he spent extensive time on the front lines of K-12 education working with teachers and students to integrate educational technology into the curriculum as an assessment tool to be used formatively. He is an emerging leader in the field of Educational Data Mining and has received numerous academic awards and honors for components of his thesis work on “Predictive Models of Learning” including a top prize applying his educational analytics in the 2010 KDD Cup, an international big data competition... Read More.

Priyank Patel is Director, Product Management at Teradata Aster. Priyank joined Aster as its 3rd employee working on building out the core product in the Engineering team. Since then he has held various roles in Engineering Management, Field Engineering and is currently responsible for Product Management of Aster’s SQL-MapReduce framework and Analytical Libraries built on it. Before joining Aster Priyank held engineering roles at Microsoft Corporation where he worked on the Windows OS. Priyank holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Gujarat University.

Previously he was the Chief Product Officer for Color and the Chief Scientist at the LinkedIn Corporation, leading the Analytics and Data Teams. Some of the products shipped include, People You May Know, Who’s Viewed My Profile, Talent Match, Skills, and Career Explorer.

He has held roles at Skype, PayPal, and eBay. As was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, he helped start a major research initiative on numerical weather prediction. As an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow for the Department of Defense, Dr. Patil directed new efforts to leverage social network analysis and the melding of computational and social sciences to anticipate emerging threats to the US. He... Read More.

She co-founded Lanacion.com in 1995 and was Project Leader, Product Manager, Product Development Manager and Digital Media General Manager from LA NACION until 2004. In those years she was in charge of leading the operations, the team and the product development which included Lanacion.com´s first steps in digital marketing and sales.

Since 2006 she is in charge of a Research, Development and Training area that helps LA NACION transform it´s newsroom into multiplatform ready, including the introduction of multimedia, social media and mobile journalism skills, technology and tools and the introduction of new formats for digital content.

Louis Perrochon is an Engineering Director at Google and he currently leads the team that builds Google’s geospatial products for businesses, governments and non-profits. These products enable you to put “your data on the Google map” and include Google Earth, Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Engine. His team also processes all aerial and satellite imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps. Previously, he has been leading Engineering for YouTube, which processes over 72 hours of video per minute and serves over 4 billion videos a day. His academic credentials include a PhD in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and 3 years post-doctoral research at Stanford University.

Mr. Peterson is a seasoned technology executive with over 30+ years of experience managing architecture and data services organizations. In his current role as Vice President of Platforms and Data Architecture at Neustar, Inc., Mr. Peterson is responsible for the Data Services group that has introduced Big Data technologies, an architecture team responsible for establishing and improving common technology platforms, and the Web Services infrastructure for Neustar. He has been instrumental in moving Neustar, inc toward the utilization of open source technologies.

Data Scientist at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. I have responsibilities to the core HPCC Systems platform technology and spearhead large scale graph analytics projects working with big data, for various industries to help customers target fraud, collusion and other red flag indicates. Prior to LexisNexis, Mr. Prichard worked for Topspeed Software R&D in London.

Prasad Ram (aka Pram) is the Founder and CEO of Gooru. While working at Google, Pram devised a prototype of a search engine for learning. What began as a “20% effort” evolved into a year-long pilot in India that included 1,000 students across 25 classrooms. Pram subsequently left Google to pursue Gooru as a non-profit education technology start-up in Silicon Valley with a mission to honor the human right to education.

Prior to founding Gooru, Pram worked as the head of Google R&D in India, CTO for Yahoo! India and research scientist at Xerox Research. He has led the development of many products such as Google Maps, News and Translate as well as many technologies in search, ad targeting, and digital rights management.... Read More.

Before joining Impermium, co-founder and CTO Vish led engineering for Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Search and Insights groups. Vish has a background in machine learning and optimization but has dabbled in graphics and drug discovery.

Kim Rees is a founding partner of Periscopic, an award-winning information visualization firm. Their work has been featured in the MOMA, CommArts, PRINT, Adobe Success Stories, and others.

Kim is a prominent individual in the data visualization community. She has been featured in CommArts and the Huffington Post, and has presented at several industry events including Strata, Eyeo, Visualized, and OpenVis among others. She also runs the popular Portland Data Visualization Meetup. Kim received her BA in computer science from New York University.

Naomi B. Robbins is the author of Creating More Effective Graphs, first published by John Wiley (2005). She also blogs on effective graphs for forbes.com. She is a consultant, keynote speaker, and seminar leader who specializes in the graphical display of data. She trains employees of corporations and organizations on the effective presentation of data with customized programs. She also reviews documents and presentations for clients, suggesting improvements or alternative presentations as appropriate. Naomi received her Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Columbia University, M.A. from Cornell University, and A.B. from Bryn Mawr College. She had a long career at Bell Laboratories before forming NBR, her consulting practice.

Monica Rogati is an independent data science executive and advisor who has built key data products and teams at Jawbone and LinkedIn; she now helps startups make the most out of their data. As the VP of data at Jawbone, Monica built Jawbone’s data science and engineering team, focusing on developing data products that helped millions lead healthier lives. Her team also analyzed Jawbone’s wearable data to derive novel insights about sleep, movement, and food, then turned these insights into smart product features, compelling data stories, and interactive visualizations. At LinkedIn, Monica was one of the early members of the data science team. She developed LinkedIn’s key data products for job matching and recommendations, and she doubled the effectiveness of the “people you may know”... Read More.

Simon Rogers is editor of the Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore, an online data resource which publishes hundreds of raw datasets and encourages its users to visualise and analyse them. He is the author of Facts are sacred: the power of data available now on Kindle. Simon is also a news editor on the Guardian, working with the graphics team to visualise and interpret huge datasets. He was closely involved in the Guardian’s exercise to crowdsource 450,000 MP expenses records and the organisation’s coverage of the Afghanistan Wikileaks war logs. Previously he was the launch editor of the Guardian’s online news service and has edited the paper’s science section. He has edited two Guardian books: How Slow Can You Waterski and The Hutton Inquiry... Read More.

Duncan has been a data miner since the mid 1990s. He was Director of Advanced Analytics at Teradata until 2010, leaving to become Data Director of Experian UK. He rejoined Teradata to lead their European Data Science team.

At Teradata he has been responsible for developing analytical solutions across a number of industries, including warranty and root cause analysis in manufacturing, and social network analysis in telecommunications. These solutions have been developed directly with customers and have been deployed against some of the largest consumer bases in Europe.

In his spare time Duncan has been a city Councillor, chair of a national charity, founded an award winning farmers’ market, and is one of the founding Directors of the Society of Data Miners.

Jason works at Datastax as a senior Big Data engineer architecting,
developing and supporting the Datastax Enterprise product line which
includes Solr integrated with Cassandra. His career has involved an
array of technologies including search, Hadoop, Hive, mobile phones,
cryptography, and natural language processing. Jason has been
developing solutions with Lucene and Solr for more than 7 years and is
a co-author of Programming Hive from O’Reilly. Jason frequently
gives tutorials and speaks at conferences such as Strata, Cassandra Summit, ApacheCon and others.

John Santaferraro is the Vice President of Marketing for Actian Analytics Platform. Prior to joining Actian, Santaferraro was an independent industry analyst in the business intelligence and analytics market. Before that he developed and executed a vertical market strategy for Hewlett Packard’s business intelligence group, focusing on energy, communications, retail, healthcare and financial services. At Hewlett Packard, he was also instrumental in helping establish the new business intelligence business group with a combination of solutions, products, and consulting. In 2000, John founded a marketing and sales consulting company, Ferraro Consulting, providing business acceleration strategy for technology companies. Along with business intelligence executive positions in Compaq Computers and Tandem Computers, Santaferraro co-founded a venture-backed, data warehouse startup company, Virtual Integration Technology, that was later sold to... Read More.

Pete is the VP of Products at Platfora. He is responsible for early development, product design, and the roadmap for Platfora’s products. Pete spends most of his time working with enterprise customers to solve their big data BI needs. Prior to Platfora, he was VP of Products and Marketing at Solera Networks, building network security analytics products to store, search, and analyze every packet traversing 10 GigE networks. Early in his career he lead Products for IronPort Systems – the first company to solve spam at Internet scale – which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007.

John Schroeder founded MapR to address core limitations that were limiting the adoption of Hadoop and expand Hadoop capabilities to serve new business critical and real-time applications.
John has led companies creating innovative and disruptive business intelligence, database management, storage and virtualization technologies at early stage ventures through success as large public companies. John was previously CEO of Calista Technologies (Microsoft), CEO of Rainfinity (EMC) and Senior Vice President of products and marketing at Brio Technologies (BRYO).

Dr. Rachel Schutt is a Senior Research Scientist at Johnson Research Labs. Prior to that, she was a Senior Statistician at Google Research in the New York office. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Columbia’s Statistics Department, and is a founding member of the Education Committee for the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering at Columbia. Rachel is co-authoring a book (with Cathy O’Neil) called “Doing Data Science” to be published by O’Reilly in 2013.

Her interests include statistical modeling, exploratory data analysis, machine learning algorithms, and social networks, as well as the ethical dimensions of Data Science, and using Data Science to do good. She holds several pending patents. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities.

Sam Shah is a principal engineer on the LinkedIn data team. He leads many of the site’s large-scale recommendation and analytics systems, which analyze hundreds of terabytes of data daily to produce products and insights that serve LinkedIn’s members. His work involves pure research, product-focused features, and infrastructure development, including social network analysis, recommendation engines, distributed systems, and grid computing. Some of the products under his purview include “People You May Know”, “Who’s Viewed My Profile?”, Skills & Endorsements, related searches, job recommendations, and more. Sam holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Chang She is a cofounder of Lambda Foundry. From 2011 to 2012, he served as Assistant Vice President at Barclays Capital researching quantitative FX strategies and building research infrastructure. From 2006-2011, he worked at AQR Capital Management in global equities research and algorithm execution. He graduated from MIT with an M.Eng in Computer Science and S.B. degrees in Computer Science and Political Science.

Jayant is Solutions Architect at Cloudera working with various large and small companies in various Verticals on their Big Data Use Cases, Architecture, Algorithms and Deployments. Prior to Cloudera Jayant also worked at Yahoo where he was instrumental in building out the large scale Content/Listings Platform using Hadoop & Big Data technologies and working with various Yahoo Properties, Real Estate, Autos, Local, News, Movies etc. Prior to Yahoo, Jayant worked at eBay building out a new Shopping Platform (K2) using Nutch/Hadoop, Search Intelligence Platform, among others. Jayant also worked at KLA-Tencor building software for Reticle Inspection Stations and defect analysis systems. Jayant has Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University

Tomer Shiran is a Founding Member and Committer on Apache Drill project. He is MapR’s Director of Product Management. Prior to MapR, Tomer held product management and engineering positions at Microsoft, as well as a software engineering position at IBM Research. He is also the author of a 900-page JavaScript programming book and the founder of two websites that have served over 10M users. Tomer holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Rebecca Shockley is the Global Research Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization with the IBM Institute for Business Value, where she conducts fact-based research to develop thought leadership for senior executives.

Rebecca has been a management strategy consultant with IBM since 1997, and spent more than 12+ years consulting with top tier clients on how to transform data within an organization into insights that drive better customer relationships.

Jeff Shute is the lead engineer on F1. Jeff has been focused on distributed storage systems for the ads team since joining Google in 2005. Jeff studied computer science and math at University of Waterloo and previously worked at a company building a high-performance column-store database engine.

Marcio Silva is a Lead Data Mining Engineer at the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). Marcio holds a B.S. in Computer Science from George Mason University, and his areas of focus include data intensive computing, visualization, and web application development.

Prior to joining MITRE, Marcio held positions at Blackboard, Celera Genomics and Applied Biosystems where he helped develop a wide-range of data-heavy software products, including bioinformatic client applications, learning management systems, and life-science research portals.

Pete Skomoroch is a Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn where he leads a team focused on identity, reputation, information extraction, and building data driven products. He was also the creator of LinkedIn Skills http://www.linkedin.com/skills/

Prior to LinkedIn, he was based in Washington, DC where he mined insights from search query data as the Director of Advanced Analytics at Juice Analytics and as a Sr. Research Engineer at AOL Search. While in DC, he also founded DataWrangling.com, which provided custom data mining solutions to clients in bioinformatics, finance, and cloud computing.

Anna Smith is a resident data scientist at bitly in New York while being ‘in absentia’ from the University of Oregon physics doctorate program. Recently, she has published in both Forbes and Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Her interests include manipulating data and catching up on the latest celebrity gossip.

Dr Arfon Smith is Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Technical Lead of the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org). He leads a team of developers, educators and scientists who build citizen science projects across a range of disciplines including astrophysics and papyrology. He gained a PhD in Astrochemistry from The University of Nottingham (2006) and subsequently worked as a senior software developer in the production software group at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge (UK). In 2008 he joined the Zooniverse team at University of Oxford and has coordinated the development of more than 20 citizen science projects and grown the Zooniverse community to more than 680,000 volunteers.

David Smith is the Vice President of Marketing and Community at Revolution Analytics, the leading provider of software and services for the open-source R statistical language. David writes daily about applications of R, analytics and open-source software at the Revolutions blog (blog.revolutionanalytics.com), and was named a top 10 influencer on the topic of “Big Data” by Forbes. He is the co-author (with Bill Venables) of the tutorial manual, An Introduction to R, and one of the originating developers of the ESS: Emacs Speaks Statistics project. Prior to joining Revolution Analytics, David was the director of product management for S-PLUS at Insightful, Inc. Follow David on Twitter as @revodavid.

Sarah Sproehnle is the Director of Educational Services for Cloudera
where she helps customers learn to use Apache Hadoop for big data
processing. Cloudera provides commercial support, training and
services for the Apache Hadoop platform.

Julie Steele thinks in metaphors and finds beauty in the clear communication of ideas. She is particularly drawn to visual media as a way to understand and transmit information. Julie is coauthor of Beautiful Visualization (O’Reilly, 2010) and Designing Data Visualizations (O’Reilly, 2012).

Carl Steinbach is a software engineer at Citus Data, as well as a committer and PMC member on the Apache Hive project. Previously Carl worked at Cloudera where he led the Hive team, at NetApp where he developed storage encryption products, and at Oracle where he was a member of the Server Technologies group. Carl holds B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Computer Science from MIT.

Ion Stoica is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where he does research on cloud computing and networked computer systems. Past work includes the Dynamic Packet State (DPS), Chord DHT, Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3), declarative networks, replay-debugging, and multi-layer tracing in distributed systems. His current research includes resource management and scheduling for data centers, cluster computing frameworks, and network architectures. He is the recipient of a SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, the CoNEXT Rising Star Award, the PECASE Award, and the ACM doctoral dissertation award. Ion also co-founded Conviva, a startup to commercialize technologies for large scale video distribution.

Mike Stringer is co-founder and managing partner of Datascope Analytics. A physicist gone wild, Mike is passionate about realizing the potential for big data analytics to make a positive impact on business and society. Despite wearing a suit occasionally, he still finds the time to argue with others about Bayesian statistics, explore the amazing food in Chicago, and has recently become fascinated with typography. Mike received a BS in Engineering Physics from the University of Colorado and a PhD in physics from Northwestern University.

Ryan is a data developer at Think Big Analytics. He leads technical consulting projects for big data implementations at Fortune 500 clients. He has in depth experience working with Solr/Lucene and the Hadoop stack.

Rajat Taneja is Chief Technology Officer of Electronic Arts, the world’s leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment.

Mr. Taneja joined EA in October 2011 as CTO to drive critical technology decisions and investments for EA on a global basis. Before joining EA, Mr. Taneja spent 15 years at Microsoft where he most recently lead the division responsible for development and deployment of all commerce and transaction technologies across Microsoft’s connected services, including Xbox Live®, Windows Phone®, Windows Azure™, Microsoft® Office 365, Microsoft adCenter® and MSN®. In previous roles at Microsoft, Mr. Taneja was responsible for leading the company’s online digital advertising platforms and its first business online service offering.

Fred Trotter is the leading consultant and advocate for Free/Libre and Open Source (FOSS) Health Software. In recognition of his role within the Open Source Health Informatics community, Trotter was the only Open Source representative invited by the NCVHS to testify on the definition of ‘meaningful use’.

Trotter has contributed code to FreeMed, OpenEMR is the current project manager of MirrorMed and the original author of FreeB, the worlds first GPL medical billing engine. In 2004 Fred Trotter received the LinuxMedNews achievement award for work on FreeB. Fred Trotter manages the Open Source EHR review project with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), Open Source Working Group (oswg). Fred is also a member of WorldVistA.

Eric Tschetter is the lead architect of Druid, Metamarkets’ distributed, in-memory database. He held senior engineering positions at Ning and LinkedIn before joining Metamarkets. At LinkedIn, Eric productized LinkedIn’s PYMK with Hadoop. He holds bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Japanese from the University of Texas at Austin, and a M.S. from the University of Tokyo in Computer Science.

Daniel Tunkelang is a data science and engineering executive who has built and led some of the strongest teams in the software industry. He was a founding employee and chief scientist of Endeca, a search pioneer that Oracle acquired for $1.1B. He led a local search team at Google. He was a director of data science and engineering at LinkedIn, and he established their query understanding team. Daniel also advises and consults for companies that can benefit strategically from his expertise. His clients range from early-stage startups to “unicorn” technology companies like Etsy and Flipkart. He helps companies make decisions around algorithms, technology, product strategy, hiring, and organizational structure.

Daniel is a widely recognized writer and speaker. He is frequently invited to speak at academic... Read More.

Joseph Turian, Ph.D., heads MetaOp­ti­mize LLC, which con­sults on predictive analytics, business intelligence, NLP, ML, and data strat­egy. He also run the MetaOp­ti­mize Q&A site, where Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing experts share their knowledge. He specializes in large data sets.

Joseph Turian holds a Ph.D. in computer science (with a focus on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing) from New York University since 2007. During his graduate studies, he developed a fast, large-scale machine learning method for parsing natural language. He received his AB from Harvard University in 2001.

As a scientist, Joseph Turian has over 14 refereed publications in top NLP + ML conferences. His team submitted the best parser in EVALITA 2009 Main+Pilot tasks. He is... Read More.

Vineet Tyagi has over 17 years of experience on product development, managing innovation and creating enterprise grade solutions for Healthcare, Transportation, Insurance and Financial sectors. His expertise includes Big Data, Hadoop, Cloud Computing and Agile/Lean software development. Vineet has spearheaded the design & architecture of several large & cloud scale solutions for data lifecycle management at petabyte scale. Vineet also leads many Open source contributions that have received global recognitions and is a noted speaker on Big Data Technologies.

Mauricio Vacas is a solution architect for Accenture Technology Labs, Accenture’s dedicated R&D group, focusing on Data and Platforms. Currently, Mauricio is investigating the role of analytics and visualization in big data and developing a platform to support real-time and ad-hoc analysis of data using tools such as R, Mahout, Hadoop, and Cassandra among others.

Marck designs data-driven solutions to help clients make better business decisions, recognize opportunities, experiment, gain insights, and solve difficult problems using large datasets and a combination of tools. His experience pulls from multiple disciplines including Internet, telecommunications, and high tech. Marck is an experienced R programmer and advocate, and a contributing author to The Bad Data Handbook and Analyzing the Analyzers. He teaches graduate level classes at Georgetown and George Washington University. Marck founded Data Community DC, an organization that promotes Data Science and Analytics practitioners in the Washington DC Metro area. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

Shivakumar Vaithyanathan is the IBM Chief Scientist for Text Analytics and the Department Manager of the Intelligent Information Systems Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Since joining IBM in 1998, he has been involved in multiple research areas including development of learning algorithms, especially for extremely high-dimensional sparse data. His department is currently involved in building systems for Scalable Unstructured Analytics, Enterprise Search and Large-scale machine learning and Statistical Modeling. Technologies developed in his department are embedded in multiple IBM big data products.

Jen is an innovation strategist at Luminary Labs, which helps companies make innovation real. A former Wall Street Analyst and Economist, and has held executive management roles at Organic, Frog Design. Jen was a Partner in Drillteam which was acquired by Dachis Group, where she served as EVP Services, Managing Director, overseeing service design, strategy consulting, and delivery. In addition to serving on the board of the Designers Accord, Jennifer writes and speaks on the topic of social business and sustainable design, and is an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s ITP school and SVA’s Products of Design.

Jen has a BA in comparative religion from Trinity College, and an MBA from HEC in Paris, and you can reach her @jenvandermeer.

Doug VanderMolen is Chief UX Architect of ClearStory Data. Before joining ClearStory Data, Doug led the user experience for Google Analytics, Google AdWords and other Google Ads products. Doug’s designs have helped millions of people intuitively understand and utilize data to make key decisions. Prior to Google, Doug was a key member of the team at MeasureMap, which was acquired by Google in 2006. He received his Masters of Design from the Institute of Design.

Shivaram Venkataraman is a fifth year PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley and works with Mike Franklin and Ion Stoica at the AMP Lab. His research
interests are in design of storage systems and analytics platforms for big-data applications. Before coming to Berkeley, he completed his M.S at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Anand Venugopal or “AV” has been instrumental in building the Big Data Analytics consulting services practice at Impetus Technologies over the last three years. With a diverse 17 year long techno-business background in Telecom, Interactive entertainment and Hi-Tech industry verticals, AV with the rest of the Impetus team, has been helping IT and line-of-business executives in large enterprises understand and extract the enormous value embedded in their static and “in-motion” Big-Data assets.

Bradley Voytek, PhD is a UCSF neuroscientist making use of data, brain-computer interfacing, and machine learning to figure out cognition. He is also the Data Evangelist for the San Francisco-based on-demand car service, Uber, Inc. Brad is an avid science teacher, outreach advocate, and world zombie brain expert. He’s spoken at events ranging from elementary schools to Ignite, TEDxBerkeley, @GoogleTalks, and SciFoo. His research and science writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Wired, Forbes, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Scientific American. He runs the blog Oscillatory Thoughts (http://blog.ketyov.com), tweets at @bradleyvoytek, and co-created brainSCANr.com with his wife Jessica Bolger Voytek.

Dr. Ben Waber is the president and CEO of Sociometric Solutions, a management services firm that uses social-sensing technology to drive innovative transformation services. He is also a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and he was previously a senior researcher at Harvard Business School. He received his Ph.D. from MIT for his work with Alex “Sandy” Pentland in the Human Dynamics group at the Media Lab. Waber’s work has been featured in major media outlets such as Wired, The Economist, and NPR. He has consulted for industry leaders such as LG, McKinsey & Company, and Gartner on technology trends, social networks, and organizational design. His book People Analytics was released by the Financial Times Press in 2013.

Matt Walker is a engineer at Etsy, where he is building out their big data stack and researching techniques for search and advertising. Previously, he worked as a researcher at Adtuitive and as an engineer at Pervasive Software. He holds an MS in computer science from UT and received his BS in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University.

Dean Wampler, Ph.D., is Principal Consultant at Think Big Analytics, specialists in Big Data, particularly Data Science in the Hadoop ecosystem. He speaks frequently at conferences on various big data and other programming topics.

Patrick Wendell is a cofounder of Databricks as well as a founding committer and PMC member of Apache Spark. Patrick has acted as release manager for several Spark releases in addition to maintaining several subsystems of Spark’s core engine. At Databricks, Patrick directs the company’s maintenance and development of Spark.

Patrick holds an MS in computer science from UC Berkeley, where his research focused on low-latency scheduling for large-scale analytics workloads, and a BSE in computer science from Princeton University.

Edd Wilder-James is a strategist at Google, where he is helping build a strong and vital open source community around TensorFlow. A technology analyst, writer, and entrepreneur based in California, Edd previously helped transform businesses with data as vice president of strategy for Silicon Valley Data Science. Formerly Edd Dumbill, Edd was the founding program chair for the O’Reilly Strata conferences and chaired the Open Source Convention for six years. He was also the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Big Data. A startup veteran, Edd was the founder and creator of the Expectnation conference-management system and a cofounder of the Pharmalicensing.com online intellectual-property exchange. An advocate and contributor to open source software, Edd has contributed to various... Read More.

Matt is a Principal Program Manager on the Big Data team at Microsoft focused on building tools to make developers’ lives easier. Matt has been at Microsoft for 6 years working on developer tooling for distributed systems and cloud applications as well as technical evangelism.

Andrew, an inquisitive humanist, is motivated by the promise of making ours a more rational society. He applies his skills to the problem of converting data into information, a process requiring scripting and research into the relevant fields of study. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College. He greatly enjoys his daily bicycle commute, Portland’s artisanal culture, and searing vegetables in cast iron.

Reynold Xin is a third-year PhD student in the AMP Lab at UC Berkeley. He leads the development of the Shark project, which won the Best Demo Award at SIGMOD 2012. He is also the recipient of the inaugural Best Demo Award at VLDB 2011 for his work on the CrowdDB system. Before graduate school, he worked on ads infrastructure at Google and distributed databases at IBM. His interests include data management systems, distributed systems, and algorithms for large-scale data processing.

In his role as SVP, Products, Scott is responsible for the Greenplum’s overall product development and go-to-market efforts, including engineering, product management, and marketing. Scott is a co-founder of Greenplum and was President of the company until Greenplum’s acquisition by EMC. Prior to Greenplum, Scott served as vice president for Digital Island, a publicly traded Internet infrastructure services company that was acquired by Cable & Wireless in 2001. Before Digital Island, Scott served as vice president for Sandpiper Networks, an Internet content delivery services company that merged with Digital Island in 1999. At Sandpiper, Scott helped to create the industry’s first content delivery network (CDN), a globally distributed computing infrastructure comprised of several thousand servers, and used by many of the industry’s... Read More.

Danny Yuan is a cloud system architect in the Platform Engineering Team of Netflix. He leads the effort of building and operating Netflix’s data collection pipeline, as well as the real-time insight project of the Platform Engineering Team. He also built Netflix’s crypto service, which manages all the crypto keys used by Netflix applications in the cloud and serves billions of crypto operations every day.

Matei Zaharia is a fifth-year PhD student at UC Berkeley, working with Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica on topics in cloud computing, operating systems, networking, and algorithms for large-scale data processing. He is the lead developer of the Spark programming framework, and also a committer on Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. He got his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Charles leads Cloudera’s product function, setting the strategic direction for Cloudera’s Distribution for Apache Hadoop and Cloudera Enterprise. Prior to Cloudera Charles held a number of leadership roles at SAP, BEA Systems as well as venture backed startups.

Charles holds a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and an MBA from MIT.

Philip Zeyliger came to Cloudera from Google, where he worked on scalable storage for user-facing applications. Before that, he worked in finance, at D.E. Shaw. Philip holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University. His interests include systems and databases. He’s a committer on the Apache Avro project.

Dana Zuber Is a strategy and analytics executive at Wells Fargo where she was an early adopter and evangelist of using visual analytics to tell stories with data. She has led analytics teams at Wells Fargo in Wealth Management, Branch Planning and Modeling and most recently in Enterprise Data and Analytics. Dana presents regularly to Wells Fargo executive leadership teams in addition to speaking at conferences. She is a guest speaker on the topic of data visualization and analytics at Stanford, Sonoma State University and The University of San Francisco. Prior to Wells Fargo, Dana has worked at companies such as Walmart.com, L’Oreal USA and Canadian Tire. Dana has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Queen’s University in Canada and an MBA from... Read More.